Seoungho Cho

A landscape that has captivated many filmmakers and enshrined itself in our collective cinematic lore is here abstracted to its foundation: colour, shape, light and shadow. Through the high contrast geometry of its image, the film brings us further from its popular references and closer to the essence of the cinematic experience.

Images from an unknown landscape are subjected to the roving eye of artist, Seoungho Cho. Details from bodies of water and bits of the accompanying landscape are seen through a narrowed view. A travelogue glimpsed through a peephole. A crack in the earth. Fluid motion broken up by small impositions.

Consciousness perceives the world through our senses and individual, subjective experiences. I am not realizing reality in a true sense. I am looking at an image made of a vast neural network that is sensing input and wired to my brain. What I see is the result of my experience. And the "real" visual world is created according to a personalized method of unraveling. The brain reads reality and creates an interpretation of the world. I confront my consciousness.

My ongoing questioning of the oscillations between my internal visions and the outer world comes with its own intrinsic intuition and metamorphoses my perceptions. In this way, my work reveals how all personal, inner experiences, both illusionary and tactile, shift and transform in engagement with this outer world.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

Cho's internal visions and his perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction. Mountains, rocks, water: everything flows, is in motion. Latency Contemplation 3 is a choreography of horizontal lines, drifting on the vertical.

A short film by Seoungho Cho

A film by Seoungho Cho

Short film by Seoungho Cho

Focus, sound and editing are used to convey the intensity and serenity of Buddhist meditation and ritual.

Seoungho Cho writes: "I received permission to videotape an unknown sannyasi having a siesta as if he were in a deep meditation. Usually we believe that body is the vehicle of soul. I would not know what kind of soul this old, tired and unconsciously open body might suggest. I came to think that what I am searching for is not his soul but mine, which is still as of yet unknown to myself." Special thanks to Unknown Sannyasi at the Shiva Temple in Pokara, Nepal, 2013

Seoungho Cho writes: "When I noticed some moments from my studio window in its prosaic reality, I started to make a 'List' of these accumulated moments of lights and colors in time suggesting a flow of unconsciousness. Ironically, throughout the seasons with endless changes of light and shadows, I became to numb to time. I have been in the midst of a meditation, which extended both through my visual and psychological plane."

Seoungho Cho writes: "This work is based on an attempt to psychologically document my routine but unconscious line of questioning as to if I were a nonbeliever. At one of the holiest places in the world, the birthplace of the Buddha, Rumbini in Nepal, I find apathy in the tension between my perception of the religion and culturally ingrained responses to my psychological state. I became aware of the ephemeralness.

A film by Seoungho Cho

A short film by Seoungho Cho

Stoned begins in silence. An image of a Buddhist monastery—a long stone corridor lined with receding columns—appears to jerk forward and slightly recede, or move tremulously back and forth. The single high notes of a piano begin to sound in a halting counterpoint to the agitated image, which fractures into a grid of rapidly pulsating segments. Cho's flickering digital manipulations disrupt the viewer's experience of processional space; his complex layering of highly saturated images results in a weave of frenetically vibrating architectural elements.

In Blue Desert, Seoungho Cho transforms a sublime natural landscape into a stunning abstraction through precise electronic manipulation. Writes Cho: "Blue Desert is one in a series of ongoing visual struggles with Death Valley, a specific desert landscape which I have worked with since 1992. It is also not the last piece, as I have every intention to continue producing works about Death Valley. Death Valley has been quite simply my favorite place on the earth since my first visit in 1992."

orange factory travels the back-roads of the Korean countryside at twilight. A haunted voice, reading from Ryu Murakami's Almost Transparent Blue, recalls experiences of pain and abandonment, while an unsettling music track underscores the themes of alienation and loss. Here Cho uses light to reflect on personal history and identity. With its somber tones of orange and blue, and voiceover that explores extreme physical states, orange factory traverses the terror and beauty of memory.

Seoungho Cho employs complex visual editing and rich sound to explore the landscape of Death Valley. He writes that he has "...refined a theme that has obsessed and haunted me, that I have struggled with, and which I owe many of my most important artistic achievements—the desert." He also describes the personal significance of the musical piece "Quartetto per Archi" by the composer Krzysztof Penderecki and the process of obtaining its use for Red Desert, writing, "...I have been obsessed with his music since 1988 and I have dreamed about using this music in my work...When I finished the first version of Red Desert last July, 2010, I strongly felt that I needed this music for my new work. With the encouragement, advice and help from my friends, I built up the courage and sent a letter to Mr. Krzysztof Penderecki [asking for] permission to use his music in my new work. As I was waiting for his permission in that long period, this work has changed and evolved significantly."

Hands work furiously over the pleasing shape of an insensate computer mouse, either out of frustration or fixation. The red glow of the mouse's laser eye glows against the palms, like Prometheus's stolen flame. The result is a kind of dance between the organic and inorganic, and a sense of the isolation one might feel in the company of devices that supposedly promise connectivity to the world at large, while also enabling a removal from it.

Recorded in the chilly, indeterminate locale of airport terminals around the world, Seoungho Cho's surreptitious footage of travelers biding their time captures the ominous quietude unique to that space. The canned announcements and muttering news reports that usually fill this limbo are gradually supplanted by an Alexander Scriabin piano sonata, lending an introspective and melancholic air to the inorganic shades of blue and grey, and the anonymous silhouettes of bored strangers. A floating set of mysterious glowing red orbs seem to stare back, eerily calling to mind the red eye of HAL the super computer from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Perhaps these "eyes" match the artist's role as an outsider looking coolly upon an unfamiliar world, longing for a communion that wil always be disappointed in such a transient realm.

In this video, Cho conjures a frightening world of humans engulfed by electronic lights and flares. At first, the silhouettes of men and women passing in front of an electronic billboard are inter-cut with flashes of neon signs and the glowing filament of a light bulb. The rapid-fire editing and Cho's accompanying soundtrack portends an ominous progression. The silhouettes give way to a solitary figure, standing at the edge of a raging bonfire. This image is suddenly interrupted by a written warning: "Media Offline. Unrendered," drawing out the darker suggestions of this rote editing software message, to comment on the precarious human dependence on technology.

A moody landscape of mountainous islands, recorded from a wave-tossed boat, is infused with the bobbing motions of the camera. In an effort to override the ever-shifting horizon, Cho splits the image into bands, each showing different vantages on the scene: the bluish outline of the islands, interspersed with views of the water's surface, golden in sunlight. The flickering of the bands, especially those of the water's choppy surface, is suggestive of digital static, a sense matched by Stephen Vitiello's evocative soundtrack.

The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, California, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. As the title suggests, this work reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, which was once the floor of a vast sea, now traversed by sight-seeing tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition. Cho accumulated his Death Valley footage over several years; the vertical patterning further represents the collapse of this footage into what appears to be a continuous drive through the desert.

In Butterfly, Seoungho Cho pursues an associative connection between a Buddhist drumming ritual and the pulsing drum solo in Iron Butterfly's famous psychedelic rock song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." Cho's mesmerizing documentation of the Buddhist ritual furthers the association by framing the drummer so that his movements resemble those of a butterfly beating its wings in air. The unexpected intermixing of the meditative drumming and Iron Butterfly's iconic hard rock classic adds introspective depth to a visually minimalist video.

Seoungho Cho's I Left My Silent House begins in a meditative mood, with black and white images of people in the subway, and then transforms itself into a colorful journey across dramatic open spaces, before returning once again to the city. The video's driving electronic soundtrack and dramatic image processing give it an intense yet somber quality. Cho creates a visceral yet lyrical investigation of the tensions and pleasures of travel, movement, and, ultimately, metamorphosis.

In 0, Seoungho Cho literally counts cars speeding down a freeway. The interwoven and digitally rendered content — cars, the sounds they produce, numbers superimposed upon them — creates a dynamic investigation of the mechanics of the moving image. 0 combines the excitement of a motor-sport video game with the rigor of video art image-processing to produce a vigorous insight into the way images move.

Snap is a taut, minimalist work that explores the aesthetics of digital video production. Fingers and hands in close-up move fast, then slowly, to a soundtrack of stylized clicks and snaps, while intermittent flares of color burn through the original black and white footage. Snap pushes figure and sound toward abstraction in an inventive, considered, and pleasurable exploration of moving image technology.

The raw material of Show Your Tongue is a document of teeming pond life. Adding an electronic soundtrack and using powerful yet subtle digital manipulation, Cho creates an intense and at times disturbing work that ventures into the potentially dangerous waters of desire, fear, and the unknown.

Seoungho Cho continues his sophisticated investigation of the moving image, its manipulation through video processing, and the ways in which these technologies can be made to represent the natural world. In ws.2, Cho's precise camera movement and hypnotic post-production techniques deliver an enigmatic tour, not simply of stark landscape and sky, but also of our status as viewers and our relation to what we perceive.

With Untitled, Seoungho Cho continues to refine and heighten the issues he has long pursued in his quietly beautiful work. The source material for this video was filmed in a Korean factory and at Information Technology College in Pusan, Korea, with extensive use of macro-focus and close-up. This intense examination of the behavior of industrial machinery is well suited to the precise, exacting quality of Cho's digital editing, in which "real" images are multiplied, re-sized, and rhythmically sequenced. The soundtrack, composed by the artist, alternates between stretches of silence and periods of eerie noise, complimenting the elegance of this composition.

With its stationary camera shots, tight focus, and almost uniformly black and white images, Seoungho Cho's Horizontal Silence is an experiment in minimalist limitation. A window-like aperture, created by severe digital cropping, fragments all that the lens observes, bodies and architecture alike, lending the images of streetlife and cityscapes the air of surveillance footage. The elegance of the work's understatement is only heightened by the brief moments when it blossoms into color and noise.

ws.3 is a minimalist investigation of the texture of landscape. A windy, abstract soundtrack accompanies close-ups of a lunar-like, brilliant blue and white terrain. As the camera arcs rapidly and images move in and out of focus, sky and desert seem to merge. Cho erodes distinctions between documentary and abstract representation, producing a complex experience of place.

A haunting and romantic journey, Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again hypnotizes the viewer with blurred imagery of passersby. Dynamic visuals converge as a striking counterpoint to spoken text by Tracy Leipold and propulsive sound by Stephen Vitiello.

67/97 begins by imagining the information collected when a bar code is scanned, and then asks: What if everything could be read by a scanner? What information would be retrieved, what secrets revealed? A barrage of text is generated as a laser reads bar codes and then food, objects, and the body, while the beeps of the scanner create an uncanny soundtrack. Cho employs the technology of scanning to meditate upon the process of information gathering and the construction of meaning. 67/97 is a lyrical and witty investigation of data systems, surveillance and information overload.

1/1 is a new direction for Seoungho Cho. This playful study, shot largely in degraded black and white, knowingly recalls the early performative experiments of 1970's video practitioners. In part an exercise in gesture and noise, the piece is also a reflexive anecdote on the nature of video itself.

The camera is filming people walking through streets and parks, but is not following anyone in particular or trying to register any particular event. Sometimes the images are blurred and filtered by falling snow, or are filmed via the reflecting surfaces of metal or water. They are distorted into scarcely recognizable, elegantly moving fields of colour, or dreamy contours in tones of grey. The image is carefully framed and divided into horizontals and verticals. The branches of trees in the foreground or floating leaves and circles on the water give it depth, thereby perfecting the composition.

In Cold Pieces, Cho focuses on water, drawing from this broad theme an extended investigation into the mutability of pure form; water, after all, has no particular shape or size, only infinite variation. Characteristically, Cho's images telescope in scale, from rain-droplets on a puddle to endless ocean-swells rolling in from the horizon. His intricate and complex processing is analogous to the motion of the water; the screen fragments into rolling "waves," roils upon itself, and dissolves into layers.

With Salt Creek, Seoungho Cho turns his hypnotic camera eye on the harsh terrain of Death Valley. Through a series of delicate formal manipulations, he folds representations of a coldly beautiful landscape into images of seething video static, water sluicing out of a tap, and a surveillance view from one office tower into another. Stephen Vitiello's score echoes the image track in describing a gradual arc of inhospitable elegance, rhythmic grace, and decay.

Short film by Seoungho Cho

A short film by Seoungho Cho

A short film by Seoungho Cho

Short film by Seoungho Cho

This collaboration with painter Sang-Wook Cho produced a multi-layered visual and sonic portrait of New York City. The artists have concentrated on the sites where the city literally reflects itself, and on the rumble and surge of traffic and transport that is itself a type of constant urban soundtrack. Writes Cho, "Prolonged exposure and thirst may induce one to experience a mirage in the desert. The mirage is filtered through undulating waves of air. In this video, the mirage of the city is captured through its reflection in water."

Using the "blink" as a visual metaphor for the often fragmented, non-sequential and interrupted nature of memory, Cho constructs a phantasmagoric travelogue. Writes Cho, "I tried to make a visual poem about traveling which contained contrary elements: manipulation and spontaneity, brightness and darkness, beginning and end."

Cho creates a visual manifestation of the dream state, an idealized dream state wherein the artist's control of technology becomes equivalent to the dreamer's control of the subconscious. Writes Cho, "While the dream is a creation of one's subconscious, that subconscious could, in fact, be the other side of reality. Could it be possible to control this dream reality through the ego? Given that this control is not possible, the machine — the video player — becomes a metaphor for such control." Here Cho literalizes his "imaginative" musings on the Freudian dreamer through an assemblage of haunting and disturbing images.